Two centuries since displacement, water crisis keeps Satkhira’s Munda community on the margins

The sun was scorching by the time Priyanka Munda filled her first pot of the day. She was barefoot on cracked red earth, leaning over a hand pump shared by 60 others. The water was faintly yellow — tinged with iron, briny with salt. 

She would use the water to wash clothes, to bathe. But for cooking and drinking, she would have to walk half an hour to a single freshwater pond, balancing a clay vessel on her head along a path that becomes almost untraversable after rain.

"We cannot even get drinking water, let alone water to use for the bathroom," said the young homemaker from Kalinchi village in Shyamnagar upazila, Satkhira district. "Everything — bathing, washing, all work — is done with this salty water. Only for cooking do we fetch water from that one distant pond."

Kalinchi union sits deep inside the Sundarbans buffer zone. Channels and rivers web the landscape in every direction. And yet, in this village of 30 families, there is almost nothing safe to drink.

A people carried here by history

The Munda community's origins lie in the Chotanagpur plateau of present-day Jharkhand, India, where they practised the khuntkatti system — communal land ownership passed down through clan lines. 

The British dismantled this, introduced the zamindari landlord system, and by 1894, banned indigenous communities from the forests they had lived in for millennia. Outsiders — the Mundas called them diku, or "alien people" — seized their land and reduced them to mere labourers.

Resistance came in the form of Birsa Munda, who in 1899 led the Ulgulan — "The Great Tumult" — calling his people to reclaim their forests. The British crushed it with guns. Birsa died in jail in 1900, aged 25. The survivors scattered. 

It is said that roughly 200 years ago, Mundas from Ranchi arrived in the Sundarbans, brought by colonial authorities to do the hardest work of all: clear the tiger-filled jungle and make the swampy islands liveable. 

They succeeded. The land they cleared became the coastal settlements of today. 

The Mundas received almost nothing in return — no title deeds, no security, no recognition. According to the Sundarban Adibasi Munda Sangstha (SAMS), roughly 420 Munda families — around 2,740 people — live in Shyamnagar upazila today, dispersed across settlements that the mainstream barely knows exist.

Many live on land owned by others, having never received formal title to the ground their forefathers cleared. The Munda word for themselves is Horoko, meaning simply "the people". The mainstream society around them have often referred to them as Buno — "people of the forest" — a word that carries condescension. 

In the social ladder of this region, they occupy the bottom rung.

The thirsty village

The government has installed three deep tube wells in Kalinchi — roughly one pump for every 60 people. The water it draws up is brackish, laced with iron and salt. When asked about the ponds that surround the village, Priyanka laughed. 

"That water is dangerously salty. Leave it in the sun — it will dry to salt. Try it if you dare."

The reason stretches back decades. Unregulated shrimp ghers — shallow tidal ponds that replaced paddy fields — pushed saltwater into the freshwater table. Cyclone Aila in 2009 completed much of the destruction, breaching embankments and flooding soil that has never fully recovered. 

Bangladesh's Central Water Committee reports at least 2.2 million people in Satkhira district face a safe-water crisis. The Department of Public Health Engineering notes that in peak summer, between 50% and 70% of Shyamnagar's residents lack safe drinking water. 

Every tube well in the area tests positive for iron, arsenic, or salinity beyond safe limits. Drilling a new deep tube well costs Tk70,000 to Tk90,000 — an impossible sum for a community where a day without forest work means a day without food.

During summer, Munda men leave for weeks to harvest honey deep in the Sundarbans. The entire burden of water collection falls on women and girls. 

Sujan Munda's wife died four years ago. His elder daughter, who will sit for the SSC examination this year, must manage the household and make multiple trips for water every day. "During the heat," Sujan said quietly, "she stops going to school."

The body keeps the score

"My menstrual cycle doesn't come every 28 days anymore," said Sulata Munda. "Sometimes two months pass. I know women in this village who cannot conceive. Nobody goes to the doctor — where is the money? The health centre is far. And the men don't consider these things important."

Teenager Archana Munda has never used a sanitary napkin. The cloth she uses during menstruation is washed in the same salty water. Three or four women in the village have uterine tumours, she said. "Someone told me to take birth control pills to stop my periods. But I'm not married and I was afraid. Besides, even if I bought napkins, the water would still be salty. And my father would not buy them."

Dr Shuchita Bhattacharya, a medical student at Khulna Gazi Medical College, explained the cascade: saline water causes vaginal irritation that can escalate to uterine infection, raising the risk of complications in pregnancy — including preeclampsia. 

Among children, risks include chronic diarrhoea, fluid retention in limbs, and persistent skin conditions. 

Bobita Munda, 26, said her son continuously coughed and caught colds for his first two years. "Every child in this village is like that until they are three or four. Then the body adjusts. But the allergies and skin rashes — those never fully go away."

A disappearing culture

Gopal Munda, the village police officer and informal community leader of Kalinchi, has watched salt water erode not only health but culture. 

"We follow Munda dharma — our own faith. We are nature worshippers," he explained. 

The Karma puja is performed beneath a Karam tree — but Cyclone Aila's salinity killed almost every Karam tree in the region. "Now we imagine another tree as the Karam tree," Gopal said. "What else can we do?"

The traditional fermented rice drink Hadiya — brewed with rice, chopped Kuj leaves, and water — is offered to every guest. To fail to serve it is a social disgrace. But Kuj trees have become scarce. The community's sense of welcome is being rationed along with its resources.

The Munda people speak Sadri among themselves, but the language has no script of its own. Those who know Bangla write it phonetically in Bangla characters — meaning each generation that loses literacy loses the ability to write their own tongue. 

In school, Munda children must choose from four religion textbooks: Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, or Buddhism. "They can choose freely," said Purba, a homemaker in Bakkali village. "But it means our own faith has no place in the classroom."

Bakkali: Same story, different address

Kalinchi is not an outlier. Bakkali village in Satkhira Sadar upazila is home to 37 Munda families — roughly 180 people — sharing a single deep tube well. The salinity here is less severe than in coastal Shyamnagar, but there is a grim substitution: the ponds used for bathing and laundry are freshwater fish ponds dosed with chemicals for aquaculture.

"We know the water is unsafe," said Sheuli Munda, a homemaker. "The medicine they put in the ponds for fish farming — it goes into our skin. But we have no other option." 

Sheuli and the other women of Bakkali do not ask the government for money. They ask for tube wells. "We work hard. We manage. But water for drinking — can't we at least have that?"

Behind the village's single tube well stands the communal cremation ground. Sheuli mentions, almost in passing, that even this tradition is quietly being abandoned: most families cannot afford enough wood for a pyre. Some now bury their dead instead.

One machine. One thousand litres.

Back in Kalinchi, the NGO Caritas has recently installed a water purification unit capable of producing 1,000 litres of clean water per day. It is not yet fully operational, dependent on electricity that frequently fails. 

The cost of running it falls on Gopal Munda. Caritas has proposed selling the purified water at one taka per litre to cover the electricity bill — a solution that sounds reasonable from the outside.

But the Mundas have never bought water before. And even if they do, a thousand litres among thirty families amounts to barely five litres per person per day — less than the minimum humanitarian standard in an emergency, far below what a human body actually needs. 

"We have no one to listen to our troubles," said Sheuli Munda, standing near the single tube well of Bakkali as the women's queue grew behind her.

The pump handle rose and fell. The water came out yellow. The children waited.